Green Zone

Question: What percent of the time do you think top endurance athletes practice in a red zone versus a yellow or green zone?

Green zone — comfortable, talking pace- easy or light

Yellow zone- somewhat hard, short responses only to questions

Red zone- Hard, high intensity, gasping pace, heart rate is really high

Answer:

Avi Friedlander introduced me to a Ted Talk by Stephen Seiler that gives us this answer. He trains high endurance athletes.

“Top athletes do not train at a hard intensity the majority of the time. It is too much pain for too little gain. This is fundamentally opposite of the American narrative which states: no pain, no gain.”

Is “No pain, no gain” the best way athletes train? NO, absolutely not.

Eight out of every ten of their training sessions were performed in their green zone.

The best athletes don’t train regularly in the red zone.

When we slow down on most days and maybe go longer and then go harder on some days, when we have the motivation to do it, then performance gets better.

Stress as a whole- research has shown chronic, moderately high levels of stress can lead to burn out, stagnation, you can’t turn on fight or flight every day.

Athletes learned that gives the optimal balance. Train hard on some days when you have the energy and motivation to do it.

So as far as exercise goes: “Most of us do not have big endurance ambitions, endurance pain is too much pain. Good intentions to add exercise have been derailed by over exuberant fitness instructors who take people from the sofa to the red zone. They return to the sofa and stay there. The training process I love has gotten a bad wrap. The human body has an amazing capacity to adapt to exercise. It is built into our biology. The process is not about pain and suffering and brutal training in the red zone every day. It’s about enjoyment and persistence and patience and spending a lot of time in the green zone.

Find your green zone with cello. When you do that, you are training like a champion.

This means slow practice in chunks and correct repetition.